The Education Gadfly Weekly

Stuart Buck
Yale University Press
May 2010

In this frank and hard-hitting book, Stuart Buck takes aim at the black cultural stereotype of “acting white.” He explains that the “careless” implementation of desegregation spawned an “us” vs. “them” racial academic identity. To wit, it was mostly the black schools that closed and the black teachers and principals who were fired; in one sweep, black students lost their community centers and their black role models, and education became the realm of “white” folks. Since humans are naturally “tribal” beings, it became increasingly socially unacceptable for black teenagers to repel group norms, a.k.a. “act white.” To be clear, Buck means this as explanation of a cultural phenomenon—one that will have be taken into account if any serious closing of the achievement gap is to occur—not a call for re-segregating schools or as another excuse for the lagging achievement of black students, boys in particular. Neither is it empirical, though he does cite tons of research by others that support his thesis. But though it is surely a touchy subject, it’s one that is actually already implicitly acknowledged and explicitly addressed by many of the “no excuses” schools, where academic achievement and school spirit are championed as “cool” behavior. This is reflected in Buck’s suggested solutions, which include fostering a sense of group success over individual achievement, encouraging more black teachers, especially black men, into the classroom, and allowing specialized, even racially homogeneous if they promote black achievement, schools. Though his call to eliminate grades (intraschool competition) in favor of school spirit (interschool competition) may go too far, Buck has certainly provided an illuminating new interpretation to the achievement gap literature that deserves serious consideration. Buy a copy here.

Kevin G. Welner, Patricia H. Hinchey, Alex Molnar, and Don Weitzman, eds.
Think Tank Review Project
2010

Everyone knows that the Think Tank Review Project just loves Fordham publications, and this volume doesn’t disappoint. A collection of “scholarly” reviews of various reports published by education think tanks—including yours truly—the book brings a scrutinizing eye to the overall quality of think tank output. The authors’ overarching goal is to encourage an open dialogue about the methodological rigor of reports published by (almost exclusively) “free-market” think tanks. They focus on these organizations because, as the authors write, they have “dominated” the think tank sector in terms of resources and output. The authors conclude that most free-market think tank publications do not meet minimal standards of research quality—they are poorly designed, biased, and non peer-reviewed. In that sense, this book and project does serve an important role: keeping think tanks honest. It is immensely important to ensure that data are sound and methods are robust, and that bias does not outweigh objective analysis. Still, the book’s overall voice would be stronger if not for the reviewers’ own subjective focus on free-market think tanks. (And we’re heartened that the Project has just started to more regularly review the work of left-of-center groups too, like Education Trust and the Center for Education Policy.) As the authors make clear in the introduction, they disagree with free-market-ers’ “constrained set of education policies,” such as privatization and school choice (not surprising, as most authors are education-school professors). Perhaps the Think Tank Review Project should take a page out of its own book. You can buy the volume here.

Kristin Klopfenstein
University of Texas Dallas, Texas School Project
2010

Does grade weighting bribe students into taking more Advanced Placement classes than they otherwise would? Kristin Klopfenstein thought it possible, hypothesizing that this “arms race” not only negates the positive effects of advanced course work by substituting quantity over quality, but works against lower-achieving, and often minority, students who don’t know how to game the grade weighting system. The rationale behind grade weighting (or assigning more GPA “weight” to harder classes like AP, International Baccalaureate, and dual-credit) is simple: If we don’t make advanced classes worth “more”—usually 10 or 25 percent more than a non-honors class—students will skate by on the easy classes to maintain their class rank, especially in states that give preferential state university admission to the top 10 or 15 percent of each high school class. So Klopfenstein surveyed 911 four-year high schools in Texas—which uses the “percentage” college admissions rule—on their grade weighting procedures in the 2003-04 school year, and compared them to the number of students taking APs, the school demographics, and the school college admission history. She finds—using an extremely complex and somewhat opaque econometric model—that grade weighting does not have a discernable effect on whether students choose to take AP courses or not, and that this is true regardless of students’ socio-economic status and/or ethnicity. Pushing students who are not ready for AP classes into them has all sorts of negative effects, so it’s good news that grade weighting is not doing so. As for the merits of grade weighting itself, that’s still up for debate. Take a look at her dense analysis here.

Yesterday marked the release of the final “Common Core” standards&—symbolically occurring in a state capital (Atlanta) rather than Washington, D.C.

I haven’t eyeballed the math standards yet but, based on a preliminary inspection, the proposed standards for “English Language Arts & Literacy” are even better than the very good draft released in March.

They’re clearer, better structured, more coherent–and very ambitious. The “text exemplars” (appendix b) are mostly terrific. The “samples of student writing” (appendix c) are helpfully analyzed and annotated. A lot of commendable “content” is tucked in among a well-crafted assemblage of important skills. And while I remain underwhelmed by the research base (appendix a), in the end standards have more to do with judgment than with science.

The four documents total a couple of inches of paper and I don’t claim to have mastered them. But I’ve seen enough to restate with fair confidence an earlier (and better informed) Fordham judgment, namely that millions of American school-kids would be better served if their states, districts, and schools set out in a serious way to impart these skills and content to their pupils rather than the nebulous and flaccid curricular goals that they’re now using.

We’ll be back with more. The Fordham team is presently engaged in substantive reviews both of the new Common Core State Standards and of current state standards in math and English language arts. We expect to produce those analyses in mid-July.

Until then, you’d be smart to examine the CCSSI standards yourself.

This piece originally appeared on Fordham’s blog Flypaper. Sign up for Flypaper’s RSS feed here.

New York charter advocates celebrated victory this week over the raising of “the cap”: 260 additional schools may now open in the Empire State. But the higher ceiling came with strings. Some are not too burdensome, such as requiring that, when charters and traditional schools share space, any renovations over $5,000 to the charter facilities include comparable updates to the traditional school. But others will be a lift—or are just plain unreasonable—like opening the door to state comptroller audits of individual schools, ordering that charters mimic the demographic makeup of nearby traditional schools, and banning for-profit operators. To wit, early reactions to the changes from the charter world were wary, though those same folks are now more positive after a few last-minute poison pills were dropped from the final law. The nearly 40,000 students on NYC charter waiting lists are surely the beneficiaries here, but their gain came at a hefty price.

“New York State Votes to Expand Charter Schools,” by Jennifer Medina, New York Times, May 28, 2010

JP Morgan is the latest member of the banking world to rally behind the charter school movement. It recently announced a well-articulated $325 million initiative to help build, expand, and renovate facilities of high-performing charter schools. $50 million in grants will go to community development financial institutions (CDFIs) to support their charter funding efforts, $100 million will be made available as “new markets tax-credit equity,” and $175 million will go toward debt financing. Those might sound like big numbers, but JP Morgan estimates that the initiative will help underwrite just forty charter schools. As with any public-private education venture, backlash against the proposal has been fierce. JP Morgan has posited the undertaking as “philanthropy,” which may be a stretch since the firm allegedly stands to profit from government tax credits for its “donations.” Valid, but mostly irrelevant. Let’s not confuse criticism for JP Morgan with the real issue at hand: A new willing and able funding source for already-underfunded charter schools in a desperately tight credit environment.

“JP Morgan Chase Creates $325 Million Fund Initiative for High-Performing Charter Schools,” JP Morgan Press Release, Market Watch, May 4, 2010

“Banking Giant Offers Financing for Charter Schools,” by Mary Ann Zehr, Education Week, May 28, 2010

Richard Nyankori, D.C.’s top special education official, has found himself at the confluence of red tape, angry parents, budget cuts, and education’s sacred cow. Needing to streamline the DCPS budget to help fund the District’s new teacher performance pay program, Nyankori announced nearly out-of-the-blue that over 200 special education students would be returning to the “least restrictive environment” of public school from their (district-paid) posh private school placements. D.C. has long been labeled “unfit” to serve much of its special needs population, hence the outside placements. But the external services will run the district $283 million this year—or $105,000 per pupil. Count it. Surprised and angry parents came out en masse to a special education “reintegration” briefing, where Nyankori said he’d “take the whip” for DCPS’ abrupt announcement, and assured parents that the transition would be smooth. There’s no denying that SPED is an indispensable though expensive venture, but $100,000 per kid?! There has to be a way to do this better.

“D.C. Special-Ed Chief Apologizes for Mishandling Private School Removal Plan,” by Bill Turque, Washington Post, May 28, 2010

On May 26, Connecticut Governor M. Jodi Rell signed into law a sweeping education reform bill that lifts the cap on high-performing charter schools, requires every district in the state to evaluate teachers based on their students’ achievement, and creates the state’s first alternative pathway to certification for principals. Like many states, Race to the Top was the rallying cry for supporters of these reforms in Connecticut. But what made the difference in getting reforms actually passed into law—while they stalled out in similar states like Minnesota and Indiana—was a focused, professional campaign led by ConnCAN, a Connecticut-based education reform advocacy organization where I’ve had the honor to serve as COO these past five years.

ConnCAN doesn’t run schools or recruit teachers. Instead, it works to improve public education by changing state policy. Year after year, ConnCAN has forged research and policy, communications and mobilization, and legislative advocacy into a powerful lever for change. Before Race to the Top, ConnCAN’s previous advocacy campaigns resulted in Connecticut’s first alternative route for teachers, sweeping data transparency rules, and a more than doubling of state funding for charter schools.

Over the last three decades, ed reformers have done a great job of generating new policy ideas for boosting student achievement but by and large they’ve fallen way short in building the advocacy infrastructure needed to turn these ideas into law. Where we have invested in advocacy at all, we have overwhelmingly spent these dollars in Washington, D.C., despite the fact that districts and states control more than 90 percent of education funding. And when we have invested in state-level advocacy work, it’s usually been in temporary, single-issue efforts instead of the broad-based, and sustained campaigns needed to achieve lasting change.

Against this general trend, a small number of ed reform groups—such as the Rodel Foundation, Democrats for Education Reform, Stand for Children and ConnCAN—have started to develop a track record of success in solving ed reformers’ “last mile problem” of securing true policy change in state capitals. It is time that we build upon what is beginning to work in state-level ed reform advocacy campaigns to bring this vital wing of the movement to scale.

Through a new venture called 50CAN—which aims to bring ConnCAN-style campaigns to other states—our team has spent the past year exploring what we can learn from ConnCAN’s successes and failures. Three key lessons dominate a set of best practices that will provide the foundation for these new state campaigns, starting this November with the launch of RI-CAN: The Rhode Island Campaign for Achievement Now.

Power of microtargeting. One of ConnCAN’s earliest mistakes was a scattershot approach to recruiting advocates. We knew we wanted to create a statewide movement of ed reformers. Unfortunately, we had no idea where to find them, so we searched through haystacks for needles. We tried booths at town fairs, door-to-door canvassing, ads in movie theaters, and online petitions: pretty much any idea that was cooked up in a staff meeting was put to the test in the field. Yet the results were disappointing.

We gradually came to understand that we weren’t targeting our recruitment effort effectively because we didn’t know what ed reformers actually looked like until they fell into our hands. If we were going to recruit the activists needed to drive statewide reform, we couldn’t wait for that to happen. So, we set out to try something different.

Stealing a page from political campaigns, we decided to try microtargeting. We matched our existing supporters to a political and commercial database and looked for the commonalities among our members that could help us better reach the citizens who wanted to join an ed reform movement but had never been asked. The result: in one year we more than doubled our database from 14,000 to 30,000 and tripled the number of people taking action in our campaigns. These newly engaged advocates became a decisive factor in hard fought policy victories.

Policies need campaigns—and campaigns need candidates. One of the great challenges in advancing ed reform on the state level is complexity. We learned that you can—and must—transform worthy policy ideas such as “alternative routes to certification for school administrators” into words that directly convey their meaning and significance to average citizens. But to hold all of these policy ideas together, you also need to present them as part of a branded campaign with a clear beginning and end. And you need to give these campaigns faces and voices. People don’t turn out en masse in support of ideas; they turn out in support of people who ask.

To make these campaigns work we had to identify a candidate—in our case ConnCAN’s CEO, Alex Johnston—who would become the voice of the movement and who would speak directly to our members. Almost overnight, the challenges of developing a two-way conversation disappeared and a new challenge emerged: how to find the time to respond to all of the people reaching out to us.

Accountability starts at home. Nonprofits trend toward mediocrity—we admit it—but when you are facing off against some of the toughest entrenched interests in the country, mediocrity doesn’t cut it. One of the greatest challenges for nonprofits is that we don’t have the natural market forces that exist in the business world to drive difficult conversations around excellence. We learned that to create those external forces and push ourselves to excellence, we needed to create the opportunity for public failure by announcing specific policy change goals to our members, funders, and the broader public before each legislative session. When you know that there will be no doubt in anyone’s mind whether you succeed or fail, it becomes a powerful driver for going the extra mile to secure victory.

As we’re learning from Race to the Top, there is a limit to what Uncle Sam can do to drive state-level ed reform. True transformation will come only when national policies are paired with outstanding education-advocacy campaigns at the state level. This is a strategy in which teacher unions have wisely invested for decades—and they’ve masterfully advocated for their interests. As the ConnCAN example demonstrates, we can ensure that kids’ interests always come first in America’s state capitals but only if we rise to the challenge by investing in innovative, savvy, and focused state campaigns for ed reform.

Marc Porter Magee will be leaving his role as ConnCAN’s Chief Operating Officer later this year to lead 50CAN: The 50-State Campaign for Achievement Now, a new nonprofit organization that aims to launch ed reform campaigns in one-third to one-half of all 50 states by 2015. ConnCAN is a member of the Policy Innovators in Education Network (PIENet), a coalition of state-based reform groups that Fordham and three other national think tanks helped to create.

We often lament the distractions of the Internet for American students. In China, they do something about it. As the country gears up for its annual college entrance exam on June 7 and 8, the provincial government in central China has shut down all of the area’s Internet cafes to “encourage” students to study. As one local government official explains, “Besides Internet cafes, there's not much else in town the kids can waste time with." We’re not sure which is worse: That there’s nothing else to do in central China ‘cept surf the web, or that an authoritarian government is censoring its residents’ access to information. American educators: Keep this in mind the next time you complain about having no control over what your students do with their free time.

“Town shuts Internet cafes to help teens focus for college entrance exams in China,” Associated Press, June 1, 2010

Kevin G. Welner, Patricia H. Hinchey, Alex Molnar, and Don Weitzman, eds.
Think Tank Review Project
2010

Everyone knows that the Think Tank Review Project just loves Fordham publications, and this volume doesn’t disappoint. A collection of “scholarly” reviews of various reports published by education think tanks—including yours truly—the book brings a scrutinizing eye to the overall quality of think tank output. The authors’ overarching goal is to encourage an open dialogue about the methodological rigor of reports published by (almost exclusively) “free-market” think tanks. They focus on these organizations because, as the authors write, they have “dominated” the think tank sector in terms of resources and output. The authors conclude that most free-market think tank publications do not meet minimal standards of research quality—they are poorly designed, biased, and non peer-reviewed. In that sense, this book and project does serve an important role: keeping think tanks honest. It is immensely important to ensure that data are sound and methods are robust, and that bias does not outweigh objective analysis. Still, the book’s overall voice would be stronger if not for the reviewers’ own subjective focus on free-market think tanks. (And we’re heartened that the Project has just started to more regularly review the work of left-of-center groups too, like Education Trust and the Center for Education Policy.) As the authors make clear in the introduction, they disagree with free-market-ers’ “constrained set of education policies,” such as privatization and school choice (not surprising, as most authors are education-school professors). Perhaps the Think Tank Review Project should take a page out of its own book. You can buy the volume here.

Kristin Klopfenstein
University of Texas Dallas, Texas School Project
2010

Does grade weighting bribe students into taking more Advanced Placement classes than they otherwise would? Kristin Klopfenstein thought it possible, hypothesizing that this “arms race” not only negates the positive effects of advanced course work by substituting quantity over quality, but works against lower-achieving, and often minority, students who don’t know how to game the grade weighting system. The rationale behind grade weighting (or assigning more GPA “weight” to harder classes like AP, International Baccalaureate, and dual-credit) is simple: If we don’t make advanced classes worth “more”—usually 10 or 25 percent more than a non-honors class—students will skate by on the easy classes to maintain their class rank, especially in states that give preferential state university admission to the top 10 or 15 percent of each high school class. So Klopfenstein surveyed 911 four-year high schools in Texas—which uses the “percentage” college admissions rule—on their grade weighting procedures in the 2003-04 school year, and compared them to the number of students taking APs, the school demographics, and the school college admission history. She finds—using an extremely complex and somewhat opaque econometric model—that grade weighting does not have a discernable effect on whether students choose to take AP courses or not, and that this is true regardless of students’ socio-economic status and/or ethnicity. Pushing students who are not ready for AP classes into them has all sorts of negative effects, so it’s good news that grade weighting is not doing so. As for the merits of grade weighting itself, that’s still up for debate. Take a look at her dense analysis here.

Stuart Buck
Yale University Press
May 2010

In this frank and hard-hitting book, Stuart Buck takes aim at the black cultural stereotype of “acting white.” He explains that the “careless” implementation of desegregation spawned an “us” vs. “them” racial academic identity. To wit, it was mostly the black schools that closed and the black teachers and principals who were fired; in one sweep, black students lost their community centers and their black role models, and education became the realm of “white” folks. Since humans are naturally “tribal” beings, it became increasingly socially unacceptable for black teenagers to repel group norms, a.k.a. “act white.” To be clear, Buck means this as explanation of a cultural phenomenon—one that will have be taken into account if any serious closing of the achievement gap is to occur—not a call for re-segregating schools or as another excuse for the lagging achievement of black students, boys in particular. Neither is it empirical, though he does cite tons of research by others that support his thesis. But though it is surely a touchy subject, it’s one that is actually already implicitly acknowledged and explicitly addressed by many of the “no excuses” schools, where academic achievement and school spirit are championed as “cool” behavior. This is reflected in Buck’s suggested solutions, which include fostering a sense of group success over individual achievement, encouraging more black teachers, especially black men, into the classroom, and allowing specialized, even racially homogeneous if they promote black achievement, schools. Though his call to eliminate grades (intraschool competition) in favor of school spirit (interschool competition) may go too far, Buck has certainly provided an illuminating new interpretation to the achievement gap literature that deserves serious consideration. Buy a copy here.